Good golly that's glorious. We need more of these. I'd be there all the time. I miss the days of the arcade. Not that grabbing stuff on-demand onto a handheld device is bad, but the physicality of these things are something I sorely miss.

I am headed to this place right now! I just have to wait until my Mom leaves the room so I can grab some money from her purse....oh and Skeeter will be here soon...we are biking over there together. Yeah baby can't wait!

It makes me wonder how much they'd save by swapping some of the CRT's with modern flat panel displays. I'd be a lot of effort to proactively do this to every machine there. However if they were to tackle it as part of a normal maintenance, I can see them converting a good percentage in just a few years.

On that note, they probably save a lot on maintenance by going to a free play model: they don't have to maintain the coin collectors.

I would assume that rent on such a big space would be a larger short-term concern. There's a crab shack near me that has the largest selection of old cabinets I've seen on the east coast this decade outside of a Dave and busters, and many of the old CRT's are ghosted to oblivion. An LCD swap would change the aesthetics but it would be nice to see old Donkey Kong back in action -- especially with the justification of lower power usage over the years.

This place in Chicago needs a lot of press so entrepreneur gamers around the world attempt the same thing! If I had more money, I'd certainly be on board with that.

It makes me wonder how much they'd save by swapping some of the CRT's with modern flat panel displays. I'd be a lot of effort to proactively do this to every machine there. However if they were to tackle it as part of a normal maintenance, I can see them converting a good percentage in just a few years.

On that note, they probably save a lot on maintenance by going to a free play model: they don't have to maintain the coin collectors.

They would likely alienate themselves from the very people they are trying to attract if they converted to LCD. For a home cabinet, sure you can get away with it, but if you are going to put them out for people to play on and get the real experience again, you just can't/shouldn't. Plus some older cabinets won't be able to drive the LCD without some serious additions of hardware and even then some just plain won't do it.

This place looks cool, but it doesn't really seem all that big, for being billed as the biggest arcade. We have a local nickel arcade that is probably about the same size, from the one full-room shot I can see. That's judging roughly by cabinet count, 400 games sounds impressive, a rough count by the image shows maybe 60-70 cabinets.

Personally, I'd LOVE to see an arcade dedicated to those games with custom cabinets. I remember getting on top of a full-sized plastic model of a motorcycle that you'd lean from side-to-side as you rounded corners in Super Hang-On. A sit-in model of an X-Wing fighter for playing Star Wars was another fave. Would love to introduce my son to these as his idea of physical interaction with a game accounts to swinging a WiiMote around. Not even close...

It makes me wonder how much they'd save by swapping some of the CRT's with modern flat panel displays.

A regular LCD has too much lag.

The lag typically comes from the scalars and associated logic. Purely by themselves, they actually have pretty good latencies. This does not preclude some one from developing quality low latency scalars that would be suitable for these arcade uses. From the look of things, most attempts to use LCD's in this manner use poor quality parts intended for other markets.

"Laserdisc gimmickry made Dragon's Lair one of the worst games of all time."

You are a terrible human being who hates fun.

I was warned about this reaction by Sam, but having the experience of dropping two tokens into that accursed cabinet for multiple brief occasions culminating in "that was it?" makes me eminently qualified to make the statement..

Your usage of the word "fun" implies a connection between that and Dragon's Lair leads me to the conclusion that you are using "fun" in a manner with which I am not familiar.

This place looks cool, but it doesn't really seem all that big, for being billed as the biggest arcade. We have a local nickel arcade that is probably about the same size, from the one full-room shot I can see. That's judging roughly by cabinet count, 400 games sounds impressive, a rough count by the image shows maybe 60-70 cabinets.

It's not a huge space, but there are hundreds of games packed together and it's a bit warren like inside there to be sure.

Ah yes. Another reminder of my misspent youth. The arcade down the street from me was similar in appearance to this one with not quite as many games. I remember going in there a lot as a kid and I would regularly see the arcade cabinets halfway taken apart and still available to play. They were later shutdown by the FBI for distributing drugs and hiding them in the machines. There's a reason many of these arcades had seedy reputations!